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Friday, February 6, 2015

Snail Mail from Elder Hall

1/24/2015:

Today is the end of my 4th day at the MTC and my language is coming along actually very well. It's definitely a lot of work that I have to do to learn but I think it's coming. We taught an "investigator" (neak rian) today named [Bong Poan] and I surprisingly could communicate somewhat with him. It's really difficult when he's speaking so fast but I can sort of pick out some of the words he says in a sentence and get the gist of what he's saying and answer. I mostly just stick to asking him questions and not letting him ask me any back. Tomorrow is Sunday and then after that I'm on the same schedule until the week I leave to Cambodia.

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1/31/2015:

Today we learned the consonants and I learned them in like 30 minutes with help from some tricks from Elder Slavens. Then later today I promised myself from now on I would learn 20 new words a day for the rest of the MTC to put me at a vocabulary of about 1000 words by the time I'm out in the field, and I taught myself all the 20 words in like an hour. Then my district leader didn't believe me so he quizzed me on all 20 words and I got them all right and he was super amazed, but while I was studying I realized that these words were REALLY complicated looking, and I surprised myself at how well I was able to memorize them, so my district leader asked me how I did it and I was like, "Its not me. I swear the Spirit is helping," and right then I felt the spirit super strongly, so I know that the Holy Ghost has been helping me to learn the language. Which also means that there are people in Cambodia that don't just need the Gospel, they need to hear it from me. For some reason in Heavenly Father's grand scheme he is taking time to help me learn the language so that when I am in the right place at just the right time, I will be able to turn somebody to the teachings of Jesus Christ. I can't wait to finish learning and just go to Cambodia.

I was so excited to play basketball in the MTC. I thought it was going to be actual intense pickup basketball, but we aren't allowed to do that so we just play knockout the whole time, and then when I get bored I run as fast as I can till I'm tired on the track. So its not that bad, but its also not great.